Millard Dinosaur Store

Giant fiberglass dinosaurs have long been associated with roadside Americana, but If you happen to find yourself crusing through Wisconsin and notice the long neck of a perhistoric beast peeking out of a general store, don't be fooled into thinking it's just a run-of-the-mill tourist trap filled with tacky crap. At this store, you can actually buy dinosaur bones by the bag. Flickr Jim Boyd's Dinosaur Store didn't always sell old dino parts. In 1974, Boyd purchased a late 1800s era general store, turning it into a bait shop. Eventually, Boyd decided to expand, offering up taxidermied trophy bucks, turkeys, and other game animals. Well, once you've gone from fish to game animals, you might imagine the next step would be exotic animals, but he decided to skip that step altogether and go straight to offering dinosaurs. It's a store that's been 25 million years in the making. While deer hunting in Montana nearly 3 decades ago, Boyd stumbled onto a bone that seemed a bit too big to belong to anything currently roaming in the forest. "It was very heavy and I thought, 'Is this dinosaur, no it can't be, I would never find a piece of dinosaur bone, but I looked around and there were pieces laying everywhere," he told local news. Jim and his brother grabbed some rather unconventional excavation tools, a spoon and a screwdriver, and began digging. What they discovered was a 65 million year old dinosaur bone. From then on, the hunt was on. Boyd began chasing down dinosaurs, and before too long, he'd collected so many he didn't know what to do with them all. Naturally, he decided to open a museum. "Behind the glass its nice to look at, but to touch 'em is the ultimate," he said.  Rather than simply offer visitors the chance to look at the prehistoric bones, he was giving them the chance to take them home. Folks who swing by the Millard Dinosaur Store can purchase handfuls of dino bones for their own collections.  "You wanna do something that not many other people do."